Angel Olsen tours into the late summer and fall, is maybe only like a quarter of the way home at this point

Angel Olsen was reportedly shocked when she found out that most car accidents occur within 25 miles of home, and has been working pretty hard to stay as far away from there ever since. Fortunately for Olsen (and us, the listening public), she’s a musician who has built up enough of a following that she can keep right on touring through the summer and fall as a method of keeping her distance from home, instead of having to move back in with her parents or commit arson like the rest of us.

If I wasn’t both sitting in my living room and aware of the fact that most horrible gambling situations occur within 15 miles of home I’d bet you five bucks that she’s planning on playing a song or two from last year’s really delightful Half Way Home (it was one of TMT’s favorites of the year). I’d also say the odds are pretty good that the songs will be even more mournful and sparse because of the painful irony that those songs come from an album whose title can never again be enacted by the artist. As you can hear and see below in the video for “Sweet Dreams,” this particular statistical revelation seems to have been pretty rough on the artist. As it turns out, you really can’t go home again, especially if you’re either in Angel Olsen’s touring band or don’t have a particularly firm grasp on statistics.

Angel Olsen was reportedly shocked when she found out that most car accidents occur within 25 miles of home, and has been working pretty hard to stay as far away from there ever since. Fortunately for Olsen (and us, the listening public), she’s a musician who has built up enough of a following that she can keep right on touring through the summer and fall as a method of keeping her distance from home, instead of having to move back in with her parents or commit arson like the rest of us.

If I wasn’t both sitting in my living room and aware of the fact that most horrible gambling situations occur within 15 miles of home I’d bet you five bucks that she’s planning on playing a song or two from last year’s really delightful Half Way Home (it was one of TMT’s favorites of the year). I’d also say the odds are pretty good that the songs will be even more mournful and sparse because of the painful irony that those songs come from an album whose title can never again be enacted by the artist. As you can hear and see below in the video for “Sweet Dreams,” this particular statistical revelation seems to have been pretty rough on the artist. As it turns out, you really can’t go home again, especially if you’re either in Angel Olsen’s touring band or don’t have a particularly firm grasp on statistics.

Hey, good news. Now that Swedish electronic duo The Knife are all hip and lauded and whatnot for making music that’s dark and deep and kinda difficult to listen to, they’re using that acclaim as an opportunity to release a bunch of music from their back catalog that is, ironically, considerably less difficult to listen to. So, basically, now you can stop listening to them for free almost anywhere on the globe on Spotify and get back to experiencing these classic records the way they were meant to be heard: once in a while, at home, on vinyl, until it deteriorates! Isn’t that awesome?

As Exclaim! reports, both the group’s self-titled debut and follow-up Deep Cuts are set for their triumphant return to the LP format on August 27 through the Artists Intel label. In case you care to know these sorts of things, the s/t was originally issued as a CD (gross) back in the heady space-odyssey year of 2001 by Rabid Records in Sweden (and later by Mute in North America and Brille in the UK), but was never issued on wax. And Deep Cuts came out in the boring, middle-of-the-road year of 2003 and only saw vinyl-hood on the Brille label, never seeing a subsequent North American release. But yeah, now that you know all that; just forget all that. Cuz now everything’s all vinyl-y and new and you’re totally buying it or else.

Speaking of vinyl being the only thing in the universe that matters, Mute is also issuing the band’s Shaking the Habitual (typical TMT Foucault-quoting anti-review) single “A Tooth for an Eye” as a 12-inch on July 23. So, you know, skip whatever meals you gotta.

If 3OH!3 is the sound of narrowly avoiding getting roofied at a frat party and Don Henley is the sound of waiting in line at the DMV, Canadian chamber pop group Esmerine is the sound of getting your heart broken — but in, like, a totally beautiful, uh, Sofia Coppola-penned sorta way. Consisting of marimba dude Bruce Cawdron (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), cellist Rebecca Foon (Silver Mt. Zion, Set Fire to Flames), percussionist Jamie Thompson (The Unicorns, Islands) and multi-instrumentalist Brian Sanderson, Esmerine’s latest, Dalmak, is also awash with the sweet sounds of tenor banjo, bass, trumpet, and electric guitar, plus instruments used in traditional Turkish music like bendir, darbuka, erbane, meh, barama, and saz.

See, after a European tour in 2011-2012, Esmerine went to Istanbul, where they got such a swell response, that they stuck around for an artist residency, and to record what would become Dalmak with a little help from Turkish friends Hakan Vreskala, Baran Aşık, Ali Kazim Akdağ, and James Hakan Dedeoğlu. Further recording took place back home in Montreal. Dalmak, a verb meaning “to contemplate, to be absorbed in, to dive into, to bathe in, to rush into, to plummet, to send your friend a Starbucks gift card for their birthday on Facebook” (j/k on the last one), will dive into/plummet into/whatever your collective lives this September via Constellation Records. Check out an album track below (first premiered over at Decoder) and pick up the album here.

The other day I came in to the kitchenette at the Tiny Mix Tapes offices to grab myself a little snack. While there I noticed ditzy cutiepies Sam Haar and Zach Steinman, the two guys from Blondes, painting the walls a really nice shade of puce. This in and of itself isn’t actually too weird. We pretty regularly let artists come in and perform tasks for us here at TMT in return for more positive coverage (hate the game, not the players!). What was weird, however, was the fact that the guys were both wearing two winter coats at once! In the middle of summer! Out of politeness I let that drop for a minute and asked them instead about their new record.

Haar spoke up first, and I was surprised to see that he had somehow covered his entire face in a thin layer of paint, the silly guy! He said, “Well, the record’s called Swisher, and we’re pretty happy with it. It’s out on August 6 from RVNG Intl. as a limited-edition double LP and CD. We actually totally re-hauled our setup and went into a new studio space before working on it, and it turned out a lot more expansive than the self-titled record (TMT Review). We tried to draw more from German synth sounds of the 70s while sticking with a really percussive backbone.” He also used the phrase “mini-epics” to describe the flow of songs on the record, but before I could ask him what that even really means, Steinman, in turning around to join in on the conversation accidentally fell off his ladder.

After Haar and I helped him, Steinman contributed his two cents. “Sam actually totally forgot to mention that the digital release of the album just came out, you can buy the files from the RVNG site right now! You can also listen to the whole record on YouTube backed with visuals by Greg Zifcak if you’re one of those smarties who knows how to work the internet.” He might have hit his head a little too hard though, because he totally forgot to mention that they’re also touring in Europe this summer. No worries, bros, I’ve got your back!

After all this talk I finally felt comfortable asking the guys what I was really most curious about. I said, “Dudes, why are you both wearing two winter coats? It’s the summer!” They looked at each other for a second, then Haar brought one of the paint cans over to me and pointed to a spot on the label that read, “For best results, apply two coats.”

Bonafide appreciators of any art form are constantly on the lookout for hidden gems; case in point: the modus operandi of this publication and others like it. With that in mind, it’s necessary to point out an all-too-obvious disclaimer: there’s no way that anybody, individual or conglomerate, can have their radar set to all worthwhile signals simultaneously. If there wasn’t so much quality and innovative music constantly being released, it might almost bring on the melancholy to ponder the fact that there’s so much quality music out there that’s also not being heard — either due to its depth in the underground, your preoccupation with other artists/albums, or because you have an undiagnosed ear infection. Might want to get that checked out.

Cue Static Crash, the least unknown release from the short-lived North Carolina band Ashrae Fax, originally self-released in 2003. Per the About section of their curiously well-developed website (curious, because of their abbreviated existence), it’s apparently one of the best albums hardly anybody has had the chance to listen to. An excerpt:

Static Crash is magic, one of the most gorgeous collections of Gothic ethereal pop/noise of its kind to rise from the American underground in decades… Released by the band in DIY fashion on spray painted CD-Rs, Static Crash found nearly no takers at its inception outside of a small but dedicated local following, but somehow its legend grew, even as the group fell apart.

“Legend” isn’t supposed to be a word that one easily throws around, and I’m not seeing an analogy to the dreamy movie starring the Devil and Tom Cruise here. Let me listen? Thanks Mexican Summer, and thanks for pledging to reissue Ashrae Fax’s entire discography, while also acting as a friendly accomplice to the band’s reunion. A handful of live dates are also planned, and an entirely new album is scheduled for release in the coming year. Believe the whispered hype? The reissue of Static Crash is in stores as of June 25.